


she cried when she saw she wasn't beautiful and tried to be real nice

by goodbyechunkylemonmilk



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Book 2: The Dream Thieves, Coming Out, Established Relationship, F/F, Meet the Family, Rule 63, Self-Doubt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 13:59:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11853036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodbyechunkylemonmilk/pseuds/goodbyechunkylemonmilk
Summary: Gansey offers to invite Ava along when she introduces Ronan to her parents, thinking it will lessen the weight of their scrutiny. Ronan stares at her fro a long moment before snarling like a feral animal and fleeing into her room. Gansey stares at the closed door, not wanting to ask someone else to explain her girlfriend."She thinks that your parents will like Ava more than her, and then that you will too," Noa says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Ronan slams her door open again and throws a hairbrush throw the air Noa's head is supposedly occupying with a degree of force and precision that Gansey envies, disappearing back into her room before the brush even lands in their combination laundry hamper/recycling bin.





	she cried when she saw she wasn't beautiful and tried to be real nice

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't really bother to situate this temporally but I guess it's TDR if Gansey took Ronan home instead of Ava.

Gansey’s fingers drum against the steering wheel until Ronan reaches over and grabs one of her hands, incidentally rocking them into oncoming traffic. As if she hasn’t almost killed them both, Ronan says conversationally, “If you don’t stop that, I’m going to throw myself out the window, and you’re going to have to scrape my remains off the freeway.”

“That would probably make this visit go a lot more smoothly,” Gansey says. Ronan huffs and slumps down in her seat, arms crossed over her chest. Gansey laughs, she hopes not unkindly. “And you’re always saying _I_ can’t take a joke. It’s going to be fine.”

Ronan, now in a full pout, kicks out at the glove compartment. “Helen’s probably already told them to hate me.”

“She wouldn’t do that.” Gansey and Helen have never had the sort of conspiratorial, partners-in-crime relationship that siblings closer in age might have developed, so Gansey can’t quite count on loyalty, but she’s laid a fair amount of hope on a general disdain for extended interactions with their parents. Ronan occupies herself with cranking the passenger’s side window open and closed several times. It jams shut on the fourth rotation, and after tugging at the handle for a few seconds, she throws herself back in her seat.

Gansey waits, carefully holding her hands steady on the wheel. Silence makes Ronan uncomfortable when she isn’t its cause. The dull anticipation when she’s gearing up to say something cruel is just fine, as is the wounded hush that comes after, but now she fidgets under the weight of vulnerability. She props her feet up on the dashboard, a bad habit Gansey had just barely broken her of when they got together and she decided, apparently, that the few rules she had previously accepted no longer applied. She grumbles into her knees, “Helen detests me.”

“Well, you have gone pretty far out of your way to make yourself detestable. Just…” Gansey shrugs. “Don’t do that?”

Instead of snapping back like she’s supposed to, Ronan says, “I’ll give it a shot,” and sounds so wounded that Gansey actually feels guilty.

“I love you,” she says. She’s never been the affectionate type. Every boyfriend she’s ever had said _it_ first, and much too soon, leaving her to hide behind mumbled _you too_ s and heart emoji, though she’s always found the latter to be rather infantile. But with Ronan, it slipped out before she even had the chance to make her customary pro-con list, like her mouth knew it was true before she did. Every time since, it has gotten easier, and now she barely feels exposed at all. She finds herself using it as a sort of balm, something to say when she hasn’t ably judged the field of landmines she’s fallen in love with. Ronan hasn’t said it back yet, and Gansey tries not to let that get to her. If her family life has left her just slightly cold underneath the veneer of sociability, Ronan has been broken down and left in pieces. It isn’t as if there’s any doubt, anyway; there hasn’t been since Gansey was summoned to the police station that first night, not by Ronan, who could barely speak, but by Devin. Devin, despite her professed disinterest in her little sister’s life, knew exactly who to call, and trusted Gansey to take Ronan back to Monmouth after the will was read. She takes a hand off the wheel and rests it, briefly, on Ronan’s arm.

“Shut up.” Ronan slams her head against her headrest, and when that doesn’t make a disruptive enough noise, she thumps it against her just-closed window.

“You don’t need to be nervous.” Gansey turns away so Ronan won’t see that she’s smiling. It feels a bit cruel to be deriving some satisfaction from Ronan’s discomfort, but she hasn’t gotten more than an hour of uninterrupted sleep since she called her parents and said she was bringing a friend, jolted awake at least twice a night by horror-fueled imaginings of Ronan in her family home, tearing down antique drapes and using sculptures as ashtrays. It’s a relief, on par with pumping the brakes right at the cliff’s edge, to see Ronan this worked up about meeting her parents.

“Who the fuck said I was nervous? I just realized I’m going to be trapped in a house full of Ganseys for forty-eight straight hours. It’s the stuff of nightmares. And I would _know_.” Gansey laughs, grateful that Ronan is able to make a joke out of something that has nearly killed her more than once. “You think I’m kidding! A whole pack of yous, my God.”

“That’s exactly the kind of thing you _shouldn’t_ say when we arrive, if you’re wondering.”

“Oh, do you have a piece of paper? I think I’d like to take notes. Now...” Ronan mimes writing, tapping an imaginary pen against her temple. “This is a lot to remember. Could you remind me which side the salad fork goes on, and if someone asks me to pass the salt, should I pour some out and have them lick it from my palm?” Gansey stifles another laugh. It’s nice, despite everything, to remember that she _is_ a teenager, to do stupid things and laugh at stupid jokes. By this point in the drive, she would ordinarily have slipped neatly into the version of herself she is in her parents’ home, a mask so sticking that she has to take three showers back at Monmouth before she feels normal again. Ronan bends her leg, and Gansey watches out the corner of her eye to see what she’ll do. What she does is, with a surprising deftness considering how clunky her motorcycle boots are, hook her toes under the latch of the glove compartment and yank it open so that Gansey’s registration, proof of insurance, and spare Epi-Pen spill onto the floor along with wads of napkins pilfered from fast food restaurants. Ronan picks up one of these, visibly pleased with her own capacity for destruction. “Well, Professor? I’m ready for my lecture.”

Knowing that Ronan will clean it up if she doesn’t say anything, but leave it out of spite if she does, Gansey just shrugs. “My concern isn’t that you don’t know how to act; despite your behavior, I do know you weren’t _actually_ raised by wolves. I’m more concerned that you’ll choose to misbehave.”

Maybe because of the reference to how she was raised, or maybe because of the condescension Gansey only hears when it’s too late, Ronan puts her feet back on the floor and turns to face the driver’s seat. Having Ronan’s full attention is almost never a good thing, even as Gansey tends to crave it, and she can tell it isn’t now by the way that all of Ronan has tensed, her face like something carved from stone. “Are _you_ nervous?” she asks, savage. “Have you decided whether you’re going to tell them?”

“Not yet.” Gansey starts to tap the steering wheel again, forces herself to stop, and then decides that if Ronan doesn’t want to deal with her nervous tics, she ought not make her nervous, and continues with even more vigor than before. They’ve gone over this countless times already, and not once has she been able to say with any confidence that she’s going to come out to her parents. She hasn’t even been able to commit to _not_ coming out to them, which would at least bring her the comfort of conviction. She throws out her latest excuse, one she’s quite proud of. “I’m not sure it’s fair to drag you into our family drama.”

“Please, as if any of you are capable of drama. It’ll be the politest disowning in history.” Ronan adopts a theatrically moneyed accent. “‘Regina, darling, we simply aren’t interested in having a dyke for a daughter, so if you could clear out at your earliest convenience. Ta ta!’”

Gansey tries not to let her voice shake, with anger or anything else, when she says, “That’s not funny.”

“It’s _kind_ of funny.” Ronan smacks at the open glove compartment, sending it swinging upward where it fails to latch closed. She says, only slightly strangled, “My father would have disowned me if he’d had the chance, but lucky me, he died.”

“You don’t have to pretend with me, you know.” Ronan doesn’t say anything. Though Gansey knows it won’t get her anywhere, she pushes, “You’re allowed to have feelings. For what it’s worth, I am nervous.”

Ronan holds herself very still for a very long time, only her teeth moving against one of her leather cuffs. She forces her seat all the way back with a grinding noise that sets Gansey’s teeth on edge, and lies back so that all that’s visible in Gansey’s peripheral is her feet on the dashboard. The toes of her boots block part of the road, but they’re the only car for miles, so Gansey lets it go.

No one wants to hear that she isn’t happy, that she craves something from her parents that they are either unwilling or, worse, unable to give her. She’s a teenager with property and money and near-constant access to a helicopter. She is only going to get more powerful, more influential and admired, from here. But having been born into this life simply means that Gansey knows all she has to lose. A certain difference can be tolerated, Glendower and her frequent moves. Even the panic attacks can be hushed up, but only because she can be counted upon to come when called and slip cleanly into the role she was born to play. They’re long past the days of arranged marriages and women trapped in the home, but she will be expected to marry, and well. It didn’t seem like a problem at first; like a proper daughter, she developed right on schedule, got her first training bra at eleven and her period soon after, and with it came a not indecent crowd of nice, well-behaved boys, some of whom she quite liked.

Girls came later, a delay she has never been able to explain to her own satisfaction. She would like to be able to say with some degree of certainty that it was natural, or else that it wasn’t, that it came of a determined ignorance. But she wasn’t the most social child, tangled up in her research and her secret terrors, so there is no satisfactory conclusion, there are no close girlhood friendships to look back on now with a more knowledgeable eye. Instead, she’s left with a piecemeal story and no real explanation.

She started at Aglionby after her year with Malory, which was a tidy enough justification for the discomfort she felt in the locker room every day. She hadn’t been socializing much, and so she was out of practice with the shock of girls all around her, jostling each other, swapping stories and tampons. And then Ronan materialized practically out of nowhere, seeming even then like a dream creature plumbed from the depths of Gansey’s subconscious, made just to ruin her. She mistook it for friendship at first, the unusually close type with which she had been unfamiliar and for which, apparently, she had been hungry.

Gansey’s parents aren’t actually political, except as a means to an end, which means they won’t care about her sexuality, except as it relates to their social standing. It will create a certain vulnerability, a weak spot in their otherwise impenetrable old-money armor. A gay daughter is a liability in a way Gansey has striven not to be. Her family has never been the affectionate type, not really, and she hasn’t felt worse off for it, not _really_. Still, she isn’t ready to give up the ambition, the silly fantasy reserved for rainy days, of becoming, somehow, eventually, the daughter her parents seem to want. She isn’t now, and Helen, willowy and accomplished, doesn’t seem to be either, which means there is still a chance for something more, some greater connection than was earned in childhood. Telling them the truth means letting go, conceding a point she hasn’t allowed herself to properly consider.

Ronan reaches out and puts her hand over Gansey’s on the stick shift. “You don’t _have_ to tell them, not if you don’t want to. It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to _me_ ,” Gansey snaps, harsher than she intends. “Sorry.” She flexes her fingers against the wheel, noting as she does the bitten-down ends of her nails, her neglected cuticles. “This isn’t easy. My parents— I want to tell them. I want to _want_ to tell them. I want—” Her eyes prickle. “I don’t know what I want. For this to be easier, I suppose, but that’s bullshit. That isn’t a solution. That’s a childish fantasy, that’s nothing. I need to deal with this.”

“All right.” Ronan sits up and starts gathering the glove compartment detritus, putting the napkins back one by one. With her head down, she says, “I don’t know your parents, and I can’t make any promises, but we’ll figure it out, together. Worst case, we’ll run off to Cabeswater, live with the talking trees.”

Gansey thinks this over, but before she can give it the consideration it deserves, a pick-up truck toting a “Don’t Tread on Me” pulls onto the highway right in front of them, and she has to stop short, the Pig’s brakes squealing in protest. While she’s trying to keep them from rear-ending someone who can’t be bothered to signal, Ronan whips around to catch the antique plate falling off the back seat. It probably would have been fine, insulated as it is by an entire week’s worth of newspapers. Ronan wrapped it with a tender, focused delicacy that Gansey had previously only seen her dedicate to rolling cigarettes. They spent hours looking for the perfect gift for Gansey’s mother in every antique shop, thrift store, and flea market within fifty miles of Henrietta. It’s the type of activity that Ronan would ordinarily scoff at, but she went about it with a mad-dog intensity, leaving a flood of misplaced merchandise and pissed-off proprietors in her wake. Gansey followed behind her, smoothing things over with a wallet stuffed with hundred dollar bills and an increasingly crazed look in her eyes. She hadn’t thought anything could make the finicky, drawn-out process of shopping for her mother any more frustrating, but being accompanied by a snarling whirlwind did the trick. She couldn’t help but enjoy the novelty of seeing Ronan care about anything other than causing as much trouble as possible, which Ronan seemed to take as a personal affront. The fifth time she caught Gansey smiling at her, she turned bright red and snapped, “It’s not a _crime_ to want someone to like you, you know.” Which was so staggeringly un-self-aware, so deeply Ronan, that Gansey fell in love with her all over again.

Now Gansey feels too brittle to mock the way Ronan cradles the plate in her arms, and they make the rest of the trip in contentious silence before finally pulling into the garage as quietly as the Pig is capable of. If Gansey’s parents catch them, Ronan will be offered the full tour, and Gansey very much doubts her ability to remain polite through the explanation of which foreign dignitaries have been inside their second-finest sitting room. She shows Ronan to the guest room closest to her room, made-up, as always, with fresh sheets and inoffensive decor. Ronan throws her suitcase onto the bed while Gansey stays caught in the doorway, feeling like an intruder in her own home. “So,” Gansey says, forcing herself to sound cheery despite the vertiginous feeling of collided worlds. “We have a couple hours until dinner, and I thought we could—” Ronan leans past her into the hall, looking both ways to make sure they’re alone, kisses her quickly, and then slams the door in her face.

**Author's Note:**

>  **let them say**  
>  that she had going for her  
> a good ass and six children.  
> that she obeyed her daddy  
> and her husband  
> and looked just like her mama  
> more and more.  
> that she thought god was  
> a good idea.  
> that she cried when she saw  
> she wasn’t beautiful  
> and tried to be real nice.  
> -Lucille Clifton


End file.
